Paris I.

Another shot of absinthe. I taught my sister why latinate diction is horrible. I think she understood. Good. No more pricks writing, at least one less, I think. My sister asks me why I have to be high all the time. I say well, why do you have to be sober all the time. It comes down to balance, and she nods. So, I say, be high half the time, and sober the other half- even senators would agree. Another shot of absinthe. Nobody gets through existence without ever having been high, and its true of animals too- throughout time- we like getting high. We like getting high a lot, and often enough to be talked about, so why is it all so stigmatized? The business man addicts to money, the addict, addicted to cocaine, its all the same dopamine, its all the same adrenaline, so who's to judge?



I imagine a world where chemists can play till their deaths because of it. Where they can make things that make you desire nothing but the greatest. Drugs that make you jump, make you climb, make you think of flying. Drugs that make you pray, drugs that make love TO you. The possibilities are endless, and anything consumed is fine by me. Anyone who says otherwise, is, the fine respectable makers of Zoloft agree, a complete asshole.



My sister says to me, " Night time is the scariest time of the day for me. I hate it. The moon terrifies me. I don't know why. I'm scared of everything I can't see. I can't even go into my backyard without a meaningful amount of fear. Inside, at night, i'm O.K., but outside i'm terrified. I fear everything, EVERYTHING, outside at night. When i'm drunk I fear it less, but sober I can't move. I hate the night."



"That's nice" I say, "Now take another shot."



I'm asked, "Who is this person writing?"



I say, "An unnecessary vehicle of truth that demands no ego to tell it. It is a person carrying a morsel of something that needs no personal explanation, to tell a story."



A girl says to me, "Normal people like me, which is (she says) half the population, say: were all so lost, in general. She says, to her best male friend- I write, and paint, when I feel inspired, but only in crayons.- He said to her, I love to read on Sunday mornings for four hours at least. She asks him, what do you read. He says, I like to read fiction. She responds, I hate fiction, I prefer non-fiction. He smiles, 'yeah I get you.' Their conversation ends.



She says, to herself, "I vomit all the time. I vomit too much, and not because I am fat, its not that kind of vomit. But that kind that wants to feel normal again. Thats all I ever wanted... to feel normal. I wonder if he vomits to feel normal too? I don't know too many people that vomit to feel normal besides me."



I wonder, " Did 'God' put us here for a reason? When faced with real danger, can we afford to be nervous? Anxiety is a modern disease. And its more common than you think. But its a shameful symptom of contemporary living. It is an unstudied illness of the mind; that does not know how to react to the realities of life without the crutch of tools and functions"



Padded boots, velvet black boots, ringing clear in my absinthe visions of the night and everything is a convoluted weird truth. Horrific climbs down steep wooden stairs in a cheap muslim hotel and I am hungry for bananas and Jambon.





Hours and hours later, I hear my sister moaning, " I need to vomit right now. I hear her gagging, she slings her body over the toilet like a broken angel- and she accuses me innocently: "you almost sold me to a pakistani, you almost sold me to a pakistani!"

I hear dry gagging in the next room and I feel thick cream running down my own throat and I understand why. It started in a restaurant eating crepes and salades, talking about philanthropy and her two favorite Ecuadorian orphans, Yamira and Elina. She loathed my selfishness, when I said I didn't give a fuck, and cursed me to hell- walking out the bar declaring me a devil. She walked back in, moments later, and we very quickly made friends with a Pakistani at the bar. He talked about his wife in Pakistan, and bought us drinks to make it tolerable. He thought, through and through, that my sister was a whore. Eventually, after buying us the thickest, creamiest white ice cream topped in rich black chocolate, we left. He told us to leave, the Pakistani waving us off sulkily as if he had just been denied, the greatest shame on earth, by a whore and a pimp; and he said without looking at us, "yes, yes, you, go, go."



My sister got back to the hotel and, offended, started vomiting. We got three complaints, meanwhile, because of my loud typewriter, and her loud throat, and I told them all in plain english to fuck off, because I was tired of their god damn Arabic nonsense. They stopped calling after they saw there was no shame. But even so, I went to sleep that night, listening to the heaving of my own blood, thinking, "I would never sell my sister, even to a rich brown man." and felt quite good about myself.



That next morning I was awoken by knocks and a french maid yelling, "Wake up!"

Reminiscing on strange dreams of Pakistanis and of being Lil Wayne's Manager, I slowly got dressed in front of her judging eyes; and was thrown unceremoniously into the Paris streets- and not the rich ones- the ones where people riot.



We groan our way around, jostling all the delicate Parisian grandmothers awake for their morning walk. Parisians are dry, I think, they do not like noise, as I recall the small brown, and pocky Arab who came to my door complaining, "It is illegal to make noise at this hour". We laughed at him and kept shooting down that weird green syrup. I could not even walk, the next night, in a hotel room much the same as the last, but a few blocks away; and my sister carried my falling drunk body, tan scarf, blue polo jacket, brown loafers, all the way to the bar. Drunk from tip to top. It is madness, I say, "pure and leafy."